Remember Barry Manilow's Mandy? It might be the most pathetic love song in history. (Full disclosure: I wept at it when it was released; I was 13.)

In an equally pathetic attempt to woo a former lover, IBM is trying to make enterprise customers believe that its software lets users run multiple social networks on mobile devices "for the first time."

Like no one else has tried or even thought of this.

Krikey, even the mainstream press knows better at this point: there are all kinds of tools for people to connect while they're unconnected. And guess what--they're using them.

Meanwhile, IBM is clinging to this notion that enterprises want to pay for tools that are bolted onto legacy applications--and look bolted on to boot.

But adding social tools to existing software is repeating the same fallacy that sunk the ASP model.

Which died and was replaced by SAAS because ASP was the afterthought of a dying breed, while SAAS emerged like the phoenix of software.

The advice Josh Bernoff at Forrester has for potential corporate users sounds a lot like the adoption plan that many companies adopted for SAAS applications, too: start small, start at the departmental level.

Here's more proof that this is how it's happening. According to Michael Arrington, Ning, the social network platform created by former Mosaic founder Marc Andreessen, is growing like the proverbial hockey stick.

Why is that proof? Because, to Bernoff's point, Ning is a cheap (even better, you can start off free) way for companies to experiment with social networks on a small scale.

If even VARs are starting to use Facebook, the revolution is truly upon us.